Deadly Cargo: BookShots Page 2

  O’Neill nodded, his mind now made up. “Would you have them come to the ops room in fifteen minutes?”

  “Of course.”

  Richards frowned, sensing something out of sorts in O’Neill’s demeanor. “Everything okay, sir?”

  “Just make sure they’re here. I’ll be in my office until then,” he said, turning away and striding from the room.

  CHAPTER 3

  Therefore, I hereby resign my commission as an officer in the United States Coast Guard, effective immediately. Please make arrangements for my transportation back to Anchorage, and for a replacement CO to take over this station as soon as convenient.

  Yours sincerely,

  Lieutenant Richard O’Neill, U.S.C.G.

  O’NEILL STARED AT the words on the computer screen—not much to say for a ten-year career in the service, but there it was. The message was written, and a single mouse click would send it off to Coast Guard Headquarters in Washington, D.C.

  He was done with the job. Even after this station was decommissioned, he knew the rest of his career would be assignments just like this one. He’d never again serve where it mattered, and would certainly never get to command his own ship. He’d rather have nothing, make a clean break and start a new life. Maybe he’d follow Richards’ example and get into commercial shipping.

  As soon as the message was sent off, he’d make the announcement to the small team under his command. He doubted any of them would shed tears over his departure. He’d hardly been a barrel of fun since his move here three months ago, and had done little to endear himself to the personnel on base. At best they dutifully obeyed his commands without enthusiasm, and at worst they were openly defiant.

  He took another drink of whiskey, grimacing as it lit a fire inside him. It was good stuff – strong, rich, and fairly expensive. But it brought him no comfort tonight.

  He was about to send the message when there came a knock at his door. Frowning, he quickly minimized the email window.

  “Come!” he called, not bothering to put his jacket back on.

  The door opened, and to his surprise, Starke was standing there.

  O’Neill rose from his chair. “What can I do for you, Starke?”

  “I was wondering if I could … have a word, sir. In private.”

  O’Neill frowned, but beckoned for her to come forward. “All right. Come in.”

  She stepped over the threshold and closed the door behind her, then just stood there, looking around with a mixture of curiosity and a hint of sadness, as if she could see O’Neill’s predecessors mourning what had become of their quarters.

  “You said you wanted to talk,” he prompted.

  “Permission to speak freely.”

  He almost wanted to laugh. “We’re not in the Navy. Say what’s on your mind.”

  The young woman took a deep breath and raised her chin a little. “What’s going on, sir? If we’ve done something …”

  “You haven’t.”

  “Then what’s wrong?”

  O’Neill sighed. Unlike most of the others, she actually seemed to give a shit about his mental state. “Take a seat.”

  The young woman walked over to the worn leather seating area and lowered herself down, as if testing whether it would hold her weight. O’Neill refilled his glass and held the bottle up. “Drink?”

  “Aren’t you still on duty?”

  He shrugged and took a sip. “Won’t matter soon.” He sat on the edge of his desk and looked at her for a moment. “Let me ask you something. You always want to be in the service?”

  She thought about it for a moment, then nodded. “I guess so.”

  “Why?”

  The young woman was quiet, as if deciding how much to tell him. “My dad was a fisherman, worked as a pilot on a trawler off the Grand Banks,” she said, apparently deciding to open up a little. “One night they got caught up in a squall and their generator quit on them, pretty much killed the whole boat dead as a rock. They were getting hit with forty-foot waves and taking on water when the Coast Guard managed to get a boat out and towed them back to port. When my dad told them they could have been pulled under too if the trawler sank, the boat commander said, ‘That’s our job, sir. We have to go out’ …”

  “But we don’t have to come back,” O’Neill finished for her, quoting the Coast Guard’s informal motto.

  She grinned and nodded. “Right then I was hooked. I thought anyone with that kind of attitude was badass, and I wanted to be like that. And … well, it seemed more fun than working in some office building somewhere.”

  O’Neill smiled at the irony of that one, glancing at the rain lashing against his window. A storm was brewing outside; a common occurrence at this time of year. “Well, you got your wish, I guess.”

  “Not everyone in the Air Force gets to fly fighter jets,” she said, sensing his unspoken thoughts. “Doesn’t mean they’re not useful.”

  He said nothing to that.

  “Now you know about me,” she reminded him. “You still haven’t answered my question. What’s going on?”

  O’Neill looked at the drink in his hand. But before he could say anything further, the intercom on his desk buzzed, its tone harsh and demanding. Setting down his drink, O’Neill yanked the chunky receiver out of its cradle. “Yeah?”

  “Sir, it’s Richards. I think you’d better get to the ops room right now.” There was an excited, almost panicked edge to the man’s voice that O’Neill had never heard before. “We’ve got a distress call.”

  “On my way.”

  O’Neill swore under his breath as he replaced the phone and rose from his desk, gulping down the remainder of his glass. Richards’ timing couldn’t have been worse.

  CHAPTER 4

  THE OPS ROOM was a hive of excited chatter as O’Neill strode into the room, closely followed by Starke. The other two members of his team had apparently answered their summons to report for duty, though it was clear from their uncharacteristic looks of interest that there was something else at play now.

  Rodriguez was the first to catch his eye. Tall and heavily muscled, he had the V-shaped physique of a bodybuilder and the attitude to match. He was a rescue diver by profession, trained to drop via chopper and pull survivors from the water before they froze to death. O’Neill hadn’t yet seen him in action, but if his bragging was anything to go by, he was truly a force to be reckoned with.

  His colleague Bryce Watkins on the other hand was a slope-shouldered, spare-looking man in his forties, who constantly projected an air of being put-upon. His thinning hair was slicked back to hide a growing bald spot, his narrow face pockmarked by teenage acne, his expression usually alternating between surly disrespect and thinly veiled mockery.

  “Talk to me, Wyatt,” O’Neill commanded. “What’s going on?”

  Richards, manning the comms station, pulled away his headset long enough to speak. “Got a Russian freighter in trouble, sir,” he explained hurriedly. “The M.V. Ossora, two days out of Magadan. They’ve lost main engine power, and backup generators are failing. According to their last transmission, they’re taking on water and might not have the power to keep broadcasting much longer. They’ve requested assistance to repair their engines.”

  “Maybe if they kept a decent mechanic onboard we wouldn’t have to come save their useless asses,” Watkins snorted.

  “Keep your opinions to yourself, Mr Watkins,” O’Neill warned with a sharp look. “How long ago did they put out a distress call?”

  “About thirty minutes. Took a while for HQ to filter it through to us. They’re trying to raise them again, but there’s been no further contact.”

  “And what do we know about the Ossora?”

  Richards had at least been switched-on enough to pull up the ship’s registry data. “Russian multipurpose cargo carrier, first registered in nineteen seventy-two. Displacement is about seven thousand five hundred tonnes fully loaded. Standard crew complement is fourteen.”

  “Be surprised i
f they have half that number,” Rodriguez remarked cynically. Captains of small commercial freighters were known to run with skeleton crews to save money.

  O’Neill hurried over to the nearby chart table. “What’s her position and heading?”

  “Erm …” Richards began shuffling through the printed report he’d received from Coast Guard regional HQ in Anchorage.

  “Take your time, Wyatt,” Watkins said mockingly as the young ensign fumbled for the information.

  “Bite my ass, Watkins.” At last finding what he was looking for, Richards snatched up the emergency dispatch. “Last reported position was … fifty-five degrees, forty minutes north. One hundred and seventy-five degrees, fifty-six minutes east. Heading is unknown; she’s just drifting.”

  O’Neill studied the charts for several seconds, plotting out the latitude and longitude. “That’s about sixty miles north of here. She’ll be drifting south-east with the current.” Another blast of wind hit the window so hard that it rattled in its frame. “That’s at the edge of our effective range. Signal the Munro and advise her of their situation. We’re in no shape to go out in this weather.”

  U.S.C.G.C. Munro was a Hamilton-class high-endurance Coast Guard cutter, charged with patrolling the icy waters of the Bering Sea and the Gulf of Alaska. Nearly four hundred feet long and with a crew of over a hundred and fifty, she was far better placed to conduct a rescue operation than a five-man motor patrol craft.

  Richards’ expression told him the news wasn’t good. “Already tried her, sir. She was diverted north to help a factory ship in trouble off the coast. It’ll be dawn before she gets here.” He made an almost apologetic gesture. “We’re the only station in range.”

  Silence descended on the room then, broken only by the faint pop and crackle of Richards’ headset, and the lashing rain and sleet against the window. O’Neill could feel all eyes on him, particularly Starke’s. Glancing up from the chart table at the young woman, he saw her look of confusion and dismay. She couldn’t understand why he was so reluctant to act.

  God damn it, he thought, silently cursing the timing of such an emergency.

  “Well, then it’s up to us,” he conceded at last. “Mr Rodriguez, prep the MLB for launch. Mr Richards, advise regional command we’re en route now. And keep trying to raise the Ossora on the emergency band. Everyone else, prep your gear. We leave in five minutes.”

  “Are you kidding me, sir?” Watkins asked. “Look outside your window. We’ve got a Force nine storm coming our way. We’re not set up for this kind of—”

  “You have your orders, Mr Watkins,” O’Neill interrupted, rounding on the reluctant engineer. “Are you going to obey them or not?”

  Watkins eyed him darkly for a long moment. “Aye, aye. Sir,” he said with barely concealed sarcasm.

  Holding his gaze a second longer, O’Neill finally turned away, directing his attention to the chart table so he could plot a search area for the Ossora.

  “Lighten up, Watkins,” Rodriguez advised his companion. “We have to go out. We don’t have to—”

  “Don’t fucking say it,” Watkins called over his shoulder as he strode off to retrieve his wet-weather gear.

  CHAPTER 5

  “JESUS,” STARKE MUMBLED, bracing herself against the console as their fifty-foot-long motor lifeboat crested another big wave, the bow tilting dangerously downward before righting itself in a cloud of spray and foam. Rain continued to lash the windshield as the boat powered onward at twenty-five knots, reducing visibility despite the wipers working overtime.

  “This is some shitty weather we’ve got, skipper,” Richards remarked with a worried frown, visibly pale now as the deck rocked and pitched beneath him.

  O’Neill, manning the ship’s wheel, shrugged as he stared out across the darkened, storm-tossed sea illuminated by the craft’s powerful searchlights. “It’s going to get worse before it gets better. Satellite tracking says we’ve got a storm coming from the north. This is the leading edge of it.”

  “You sure we can even make it in this thing?” Richards asked.

  “She’s designed to survive sixty-knot winds and twenty-foot waves,” O’Neill said, increasing power as the bow rose skyward and the boat tackled another towering wave. “Beyond that … your guess is as good as mine.”

  Richards swallowed hard, looking like he was about to throw up.

  “You got anything on radar?” O’Neill asked.

  Starke scanned her scope. “Nothing yet. There’s too much surface clutter with all these waves. You sure this is the right area?”

  The commander glanced at her. “Assuming the position they gave was accurate, they should have drifted with the current and ended up somewhere around here.”

  Richards glanced at the fuel readouts. A third of their reserve had been used up just getting out to the search area. “We can’t stay here more than an hour or we’ll be swimming home, sir.”

  “Then we’d better hope we find them, hadn’t we, Richards?”

  “I’m telling you, man. The guy’s bad fucking news,” Watkins said as he leaned over to check the oil pressure on the starboard diesel engine, having to shout to be heard above the din. “Why the hell do you think someone like him got posted out here in the first place?”

  “How the hell should I know?” Rodriguez fired back. “Maybe he likes peace and quiet.”

  “Nah, there’s more to it than that—you mark my words, boy.” Glancing towards the hatch leading forward to make sure it was still secured, he added, “I’ve got a buddy in Anchorage. He says the word is that O’Neill got one of his crew killed, but he was too well connected to be discharged so they sent him out here until it all died down.”

  “I’m calling bullshit on that, dude,” Rodriguez scoffed.

  “Call it what you want, but I sure as hell ain’t turning my back on that guy.”

  Occupied in conversation, they failed to hear the click as the hatch was opened behind them, and whirled around in surprise to see Starke standing there braced against the bulkhead. She was watching them with the kind of wary distrust that suggested she’d heard more than they’d intended.

  “Hey, Kate,” Rodriguez said innocently. “You need something?”

  She eyed the two men a moment longer before speaking. “Skipper wants a fuel status update, and you’re not answering your comms.”

  “Would you look at that?” Watkins said, checking the intercom unit mounted on the wall and turning the volume dial back up. “Must have switched it off without realizing.”

  “Might want to keep an eye on that in future,” the young woman advised.

  “Will do,” Watkins agreed, smiling at her without warmth. “Anything else?”

  No doubt she was aware of the hostility radiating from him, but to her credit she appeared unshaken by it.

  The uneasy standoff was broken only when the intercom crackled into life with O’Neill’s voice. “Starke, get up to the bridge now. Acknowledge.”

  Keeping her eyes on Watkins, Starke reached out and hit the bridge transmit button on the unit. “On my way.”

  “Better run. Captain’s calling,” Watkins said, his tone faintly mocking as she unlatched the hatch and stepped out of the engine room.

  “Watch yourself, Watkins. No telling who might overhear you,” Starke advised, before swinging the hatch closed behind her.

  “Bitch,” Watkins mumbled, resuming his work.

  CHAPTER 6

  BY THE TIME Starke had clambered up the gangway to the boat’s enclosed bridge and glanced out the window, it was obvious enough why O’Neill had summoned her here.

  About a mile directly ahead, partially lit by the dim orange glow of her recognition lights, lay the massive bulk of the M.V. Ossora. The big freighter was still too distant for her to make out details, but judging by the movement of her lights, she was stationary and swaying slowly in the rough seas.

  “M.V. Ossora, M.V. Ossora. This is U.S. Coast Guard vessel off your port beam, hailing you on em
ergency channel,” O’Neill spoke into the radio. “Acknowledge this transmission.”

  His hail was met by the pop and crackle of static.

  “Repeat, this is U.S. Coast Guard vessel responding to your distress call. If you cannot respond verbally, acknowledge with Morse lamp or a horn blast.”

  Nothing. O’Neill’s face was etched with concern now.

  “Maybe their radio’s down,” Richards suggested.

  “They still have power,” Starke pointed out. “If they can see us, they should be able to signal somehow.”

  Richards checked his radar, where the hull of the big ship showed as a bright splash across the screen. “Range down to eight hundred yards and closing, sir.”

  O’Neill chewed on it for a moment or two before replacing the radiophone in its cradle. “Reduce speed to ten knots. We’re going in for a closer look,” he decided. “Starke, light her up.”

  Flicking on the powerful searchlights mounted topside, Starke watched as the twin beams illuminated the big vessel directly ahead. Towering black walls of steel streaked with rust rose up from the rough sea, giving way to a blunt, crude-looking bow that seemed designed to force its way through the water by sheer brute strength. On deck, the great booms of cranes mounted forward and aft hovered unmoving above the cargo holds, while behind them sat the discolored white box-like superstructure that housed the bridge and crew accommodation.

  Aside from a few running lights along the deck and mastheads, there was no sign of life aboard the vessel.

  “Range down to two hundred,” Richards said as they closed in.

  O’Neill’s gaze was fixed straight ahead. “Steady as she goes.”